Hi,
On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 09:26:29AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Nothing on the system depends on atime, although sometimes it's useful
> for the system administrator to see if a particular file is being
> used. So it's one of those niceties which can be useful on occassion,
> but which I've decided to forego in the interests of keeping the disks
> spundown more often.
"tmpwatch" depends on atime. tmpwatch deletes files in /tmp which
haven't been accessed for a while (usually a few days), and if you
have tmp files which you don't modify but which you read regularly,
noatime will cause them to disappear before you're finished with
them.
"mount -o nodiratime" can help there in some situations. With that,
you'll still get atime updated on files, but background daemons such
as cron, which periodically scan their spool directories looking for
new work, won't update the atimes on those directories so they won't
cause permanent background disk write activity.
Cheers,
Stephen